A Nation of Amor Read online

  “When we walked into the classroom, Mrs. Kmet leapt toward us like she thought we were going to steal something. All the Puerto Rican kids were promptly put in the corner. We hadn’t even done anything yet! After we’d been herded, Mrs. Kmet got all the white children to sit in a circle on the carpet, she called it a ‘big apple pie.’

  “Mrs. Kmet was so impressed when my mother introduced herself in English that she felt compelled to shake her hand, though not compelled enough to offer more than a grim nod to the rest of the mothers. Formalities dealt with, Mrs. Kmet severed the umbilical cord and shuffled our links with the Spanish language out of the classroom. Like a crossing guard, arms outstretched, Mrs. Kmet carefully formed a human shield between our mothers and the white children.

  “The door closed and we began to sweat. You sweat at a tender age in a white school. Not kid sweat either, which is tears, but for real palms and underarms and feeling damp in your crotch sweat, like, something’s coming down soon and who’s watching my back? We fell together in a clump, backed into the corner by this ominous Polacka descending upon us.

  “Personally, I’ve always loathed charades, but when Mrs. Kmet started clapping and snapping at us I must admit that my attention was riveted. Well mother fuck me! A 5-year-and-change veteran of this world, and until that moment I hadn’t realized I was a dog. Crazy blanca was clapping, snapping, whistling, then she patted the side of her leg, wanted us to heel. I gave my older brother Bobo some eyebrow chatter, like, whoa this woman is lupin for real.

  “Bobo and I are Irish twins. My mother started us in school the same year so she could get more hours at the factory. My eldest brother Angel watched Bobo and me after school.

  “Before resorting to a rolled-up newspaper, Mrs. Kmet decided to give it one last chance and beamed us an exaggerated frown. She said, ‘Raymond! Raymond I am speaking to you. I would like you and your friends to follow me.’

  “So who the fuck was Raymond? My name’s always been Reynaldo to everybody except my older brothers. Ever a benevolent tyke, I thought I’d help her out by identifying some dopey white kid named Raymond. As I scanned the room it occurred to me that nary a Puerto Rican had been offered a seat on the crust of the ‘big apple pie.’ At this juncture, it didn’t look too promising for the Latin constituency.

  “Unfortunately, every pupil but me had by then realized that I was the Raymond to whom she was referring. So Bobo discreetly stepped on my toe to get me to answer. I watched her continue the snapping and clapping routine until I figured, mira, I may be only five, but you got me messed up with somebody else if you think that’s how you’re going to get us to follow you. I said, ‘Excuse me teacher, but are you speaking to me?’

  “She jumped as if an ice tong were applied to her bare ass. With a finger wag she said, ‘Of course I was Raymond.’ So I said, ‘I’m sorry, but my name is Reynaldo.’ But she ain’t buyin’ any innocence via semantics. Mrs. Kmet said, ‘We’ll shorten that down to Ray and make it easier.’

  “Damn white people! In under two minutes she negated the years of dependable service I had out of that name. Those blanco kids figured kindergarten was better than the circus, nothing else for thirty rubber-necks to do besides take in the side show. She said, ‘Tell your friends to follow me. Closely now, we don’t want to lose anybody.’ I turned around to Bobo and the rest of them and said, ‘Vámanos,’ and we wistfully left the ‘big apple pie’ on the carpet.

  “We walked down the checkerboard-tiled hallway and the last classroom we passed was another kindergarten full of black children. Some of the kids I knew, they walked past our house on the way to the Baptist Church at the end of the block. I stopped for a second, yep, a black teacher with plenty of drawers corralling the kids into a ‘big sweet potato pie.’

  “Back then, the little white children got new books and the little black children got old books. We got crayons. Mrs. Kmet dumped us inside some dingy boiler room where the janitor kept the mops. A student teacher, about 15 years old and consumptive, sat us around a little table and passed out the crayons and paper. Welcome to school.

  “After two weeks of this my mother’s refrigerator positively sagged under the weight of my output. She thought she had inadvertently enrolled me in art school. Remember pictures you drew in kindergarten? There was my mother in front of our house, me in front of the house, Bobo in front of the house, Bobo and me in front of my mother in front of the house …

  “My mother spoke to the principal. We had to stay in the boiler room, but the student teacher scammed some books from the black kids and cut out letters and numbers from construction paper. We still had plenty of coloring time every day.

  “The basic problem was left unaddressed. Five Puerto Rican children couldn’t form much of a pie in that cluttered, dingy boiler room.”

  Only one classroom I’ve seen since that first year of school could compete with the old boiler room. Naturally, I’m lecturing within it. Yet they are relaxed, unmannered, even the bored ones, who are granting me untold respect by hedging innate disruptive urges while I jaw flap like some toothless great-uncle.

  Of the five of us in that kindergarten class, one is dead I think, another in jail, of that I’m certain. I just got out of jail, but I’m a teacher now, Bobo’s alderman, that makes four. And there was a little girl, her youngest would be entering kindergarten about now. Bobo and I were the only two to finish high school, 40 percent, not bad. Hell, it only took two decades of social activism to effectively halve that watermark.

  Now, there are no white kids in Westtown, black kids are in a lesser ratio at Clemente than we were back then. The only difference is a few more boxcars were coupled to the engine.

  During orientation week I made a point to attempt a bit of up close and personal with each student. When I asked Richie Colón, champion gold displayer, how he felt about his experience at Clemente, he told me that what goes around comes around.

  What the hell is that supposed to mean? Any intellectual worth his pillar of salt would chalk it up to the old disaffected youth bit. Circus caravans, boiler rooms, boxcars; the cage is now so big Richie’s never seen the bars. In the same breath, Richie went on to inform me that he aspires to be a lawyer. I told him that meant four years of college and three more years of law school. After a few seconds of reconsideration, he decided upon investment banking. I asked him to initially concentrate on arriving for class on time. We’ll see what develops from there.

  A social worker in every jail listens to all of your dreams and aspirations and basically advises federal prisoners to look at life as if it were a truly radical wave; go for it, dude. The guidance counselors at Clemente undoubtedly toed an identical line with Richie, regardless of his 1.2 grade point average. Mustn’t quash the dreams of youth, somebody might call us unsupportive.

  Bullshit. These kids need a steel-toed boot of reality firmly planted up each young ass. I shall be that boot. Otherwise, when Richie sees everybody goin’ round to Stateville on a five-year bid, he won’t be any too surprised when his sentence comes ’round to him.

  “After the experience of kindergarten, we were allowed to integrate in the higher grades. These years represented the only times during my childhood when I ever truly thanked God for my older brother Angel’s existence. We lived in a tiny ghetto; to the west were factories and the river, to the south the brothers, to the north white people, to the east was the Loop.

  “By age nine, a sufficient number of Puerto Rican fourth-graders allowed us to fight back. A dozen of us that lived on or near Dayton Street traveled en masse to and from school. We could defend ourselves well enough because the other kids had to organize twice our numbers to ensure no major losses. If you had to travel alone, you expected at best a lunch money shakedown, at worst a grundy or a bloody nose. Blood can be cleaned off in a puddle, but how do you explain to your mother why a group of your classmates ruined your new briefs by yanking them up between your cheeks?

  “But as I said, red clip-on mittens were
the harbinger of the Latin Kings. For months before that Christmas I staged tantrums for my mother. Nobody who had any sense of style still wore those damn red mittens with little elastic bands that clipped to your coat sleeves. The only X-mas present I requested was a pair of gloves. My mother thoughtlessly offered to replace my ruined underwear. I bravely volunteered to go commando. Who needs briefs? Red mittens were as socially debilitating as throwing a baseball like a girl.

  “Feliz Navidad! Four pairs of Woolworth’s finest Y-fronts from my mother. But Angel, six years older than me and an aficionado of the fashion requirements on the playground, gave me a pair of gloves. Not merely gloves: black leather gloves, like race car drivers wear, with holes over the knuckles and a zipper with a big gold loop down the back.

  “The first day at school after Christmas break I was pimpin’ those gloves all over the playground. Man-sized, I had to stuff them into the sleeves of my sweater to keep them from falling off. I refused to remove them in class. My hands looked like I’d been booked and fingerprinted from the black dye running onto my sweaty palms. I was prepared to fail penmanship for my gloves.

  “After school that afternoon, everybody from Dayton Street went to throw snowballs at cars. No way I was going to ruin my new gloves in the snow, so I dared to walk home alone. I was cutting through the vacant lot across from my house when about a dozen black kids emerged from around the corner. In a minute, man, in a second, I would have given them my jacket, hat, shoes, walked home naked and takin’ any number of beatings to save my new gloves.

  “You may have noticed I have a big mouth. It was bigger and under far less control during my formative years. Earlier that morning I housed the leader of the fourth grade black kids in front of all his friends on the school playground. That was the only place to bust out on the black kids because we couldn’t fight on school grounds without our mothers getting a phone call. The leader of the black kids didn’t have gloves, or even red mittens to clip to his coat sleeves. His mama made him wear an old pair of socks on his hands. That morning I had asked him how come his mama wouldn’t at least clean his socks before she made him wear them to school.

  “I was kickin’ myself in the ass when I saw them waitin’ for me. So this black kid, holding a two-by-four in his hand, informs me he’s gonna take my gloves, they’re all gonna whup on me and watch me cry, then they’ll send me home to my mama to get another beating. Damn, that’s some tall planning for a nine-year-old.

  “So I spat on him and tried to run. Right there in the vacant lot across from my own house, they got me down in the snow poundin’ me with that two-by-four. I cried out for somebody, anybody, to come and save me.

  “Then Angel came running from the house without any shoes on his feet, leaping through the snow. But Angel couldn’t run too well barefoot in January and the black kids scattered, my honor was left unavenged. Red and shivering, his arms folded across his chest, Angel looked down at me and said, ‘Quit cryin’,’ then cursed my name all the way home.

  “That wasn’t all. My luck was that Tía Lucia saw me and rushed from her house to pull my pants down and beat me right there in the street. That night, my mother beat me once for fighting in front of the neighbors, once for getting Angel’s feet frozen, and another time for losing my gloves.

  “A lost pair of gloves sparked Angel and some of the bigger kids to start the Latin Kings. After I got beat up, the Latin Kings walked all the Puerto Rican children home from school. They walked with the women to the store and translated to English for them, then helped carry the groceries home. They watched over the girls so they wouldn’t get harassed on the street. They didn’t have colors, jackets, guns, they didn’t sell drugs. They started throwing parties where Puerto Rican kids could dance to Salsa music. They watched everybody’s back on our six-block piece of the pie.”

  To Mano and Flaco, Papa was the guy in a black leather trench coat who appeared intermittently to jack-up their mother.

  But I was nine years old when my pair of race car driver gloves miraculously appeared beneath the Christmas tree. With that action, Angel crossed into terrain previously trod upon only by superhuman figures of childhood fantasy.

  So why shouldn’t I speak of Angel in the same breath as Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy? Because I know, but won’t tell these kids, that horniness kindled the green timber of the original Latin Kings far more than my gloves or Tía Lucia’s inability to lug a 20-pound sack of arroz. To the adults, those first Latin Kings were perceived as the local bums. No neighborhood father would allow his daughter to date Angel or his pals.

  So honestly, if forced to choose a Cleaver, I should really write-in Eddie Haskell.

  MARIZA DEL RIOS

  November 9, at home

  The TV says,

  “Your brand new, super deluxe, remodeled kitchen!”

  Layin’ tall, slop kisses all over this viejo for lettin’ her win the machines. Seems like all I ever get outta bed for these days is the games. Look at this girl cryin’ on TV because she just won a automatic plate cleaner, clothes cleaner, rug cleaner, even a garbage cleaner to keep from smellin’ chicken bones in the bin all night. TV some tall con, but it won’t never touch me anywhere so I keep it on all day to hear some voices around this lonely crib.

  How about Mariza Del Rios come on down? I know the man. Standin’ up at the front like it be a spelling bee, asking questions, clock’s ticking bitch, hurry now! The buzzer sounds and girlfriend, you lose. None of your dreams gonna come true for keepin’ man, baby, and crib clean and happy with luxury prizes. I watched this same shit long time ago when I stayed home from school with the chicken pox. When Mama came home from work I begged her to go on the game.

  I said,

  “Mama you got to go all the way for the car.”

  Mama lookin’ at me like the chicken pox be the best of my troubles. But we didn’t have a car! Honey, I’d take that vacuum cleaner now and praise God above cuz then I wouldn’t have to walk on Mano’s toenail clippings no more.

  So where’s my prize? I answer the man, twenty-four of twenty-four. This TV ain’t even color. Always the man who reads her the rules, tells her time’s running out, hands out the prizes. What’s so different with me? Mano ain’t wearin’ no tuxedo or offerin’ plane tickets to Mexico, that’s what. I ain’t won anything but time to get fat alone in this crummy crib all day.

  Mano said,

  “You never go outta the house without me!”

  What kind of rules is that? My clothes are dirty, got no eye shadow, outside the leaves are falling, I want to hear them crunch under my feet when I walk in the park. So hard to enjoy anything when I do get out of these four walls, my eyes down, my head so full of watchin’ myself to keep him happy I don’t even know if anything else is going on around me. I could go out and work somewheres and do things to make it all better and easier for us. What’s this girl won? A VCR, for real we need one of those. I see those rules from the man, but this ain’t right when the only rules I get mean if the buzzer buzzes I get it with hands instead of not winnin’ the luxury family room set.

  Can’t even sneak out with all Mano’s bro’s on the corner day and night. Mano, cabrón, in school all day probably kickin’ it to some hole. My only window here that don’t look out on a brick wall is full of Kings on our corner, P-Dub, ET, Bobby, who would trick on me to Mano in a second.

  Only twenty more minutes ’til I turn into some kind of soap junkie. No different from the games except for buzzers and questions, the man still got to hear the right answer before she gets the prize. Are they gonna get married or bust it? This guy slippin’ with that girl and everybody a cop, doctor, or lawyer. Every woman ain’t shit without her man, alone women always be some nasty villain trying to gangster like the men. This girl, she’s after money and slippin’ with every guy on the soap until she gets married to some punk that can’t fight and still she be givin’ it up all over the place, the skank. The men don’t even gangster her, they got it too good, it be all the
other women kickin’ her ass cuz she ain’t behavin’. They be feeling sorry for the punk she married! So the women gangster her until she crosses her legs at everybody but the punk, everything be straight because she follows the man’s rules like the other women. But the gangbangin’ men always got women throwin’ it at them? Stuck in this crib only to see all my own dirt on the little screen.

  Outside my window the cops cruise by, here they come and there they go, all the Kings book down the alley like if bowling pins had legs. The squad car pulls past the corner, seems like the only time nobody be watchin’ me for Mano is when Husky passes by. Even the Latin Kings got the man, got to follow some rules.

  I hear somebody at the back door, banging, not a visiting knock either. I leave the chain and open the door a crack. Husky’s behind some cop who flashes a badge but ain’t got no uniform on.

  The cop says,

  “I’m Detective Mullen sweetheart, is Rey Matos here?”

  This fucking family! Locos, every one of them.

  I say,

  “There ain’t no Rey, it’s only me and Mano. And only Flaco lives upstairs in the other apartment.”

  But I’m like a Matos now, suddenly feeling all itchy at this cop. I make a boldness come into my eyes and curl my lip up all snotty at him.

  Detective Mullen says,

  “Take it easy honey, I’m only looking for Rey Matos. Is he living here these days?”

  He smiles at me like he knows me from way back. Lookin’ for Mano’s Uncle Rey who be just down the street at the school. But that don’t make any sense, Husky knows Rey don’t live here. They must want something else. The only thing payin’ off these days is bein’ a tough guy, huh? Maybe I should be a little tougher.